Library and Information Science Commons^™

Open Parks Network: Parks For The People, Christopher Vinson, Rachel Wittmann

Presentations

The Open Parks Network serves the global parks community by providing the information, tools, and solutions to support the stewardship of the natural and cultural assets of protected areas. To date, over 350,000 items and 1.5 million pages of material has been digitized as part of this project. This presentation details the project's background and strategies used for digitization and metadata creation. Additionally, the Abraham Lincoln Birthplace Donor Card Collection project is detailed. This webinar presentation was conducted as part of the LYRASIS "Second Friday" series.

Find Your Park Metadata, Rachel Wittmann, Christopher Vinson, Joshua Morgan

Presentations

The Open Parks Network (OPN) project digitized over 330k items from U.S. national and state parks. While the mass digitization effort was a logistically challenging operation, ensuring metadata for this material added another layer of complexity this offsite-managed project. In the best case scenario, the parks provided existing descriptive metadata, but this still lacked preferred elements. In many cases, digitized material had never been cataloged by the park.

To orchestrate adequate descriptive metadata, OPN employed tactics to catalog this large-scale project. This session encourages an exchange of experiences and ideas from others when faced with similar situations.